Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown’ On Hulu, A Docuseries Dissecting The Events Of The 1978 Jonestown Massacre

In the three-part docuseries Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown, director Marian Mohamed and producers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin dissect the day of the November 18, 1978 Jonestown massacre, where over 900 members of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple were persuaded by Jones to poison themselves and their families.

CULT MASSACRE: ONE DAY IN JONESTOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Archival footage of Jim Jones preaching to the congregants in the Peoples Temple in the early 1970s.

The Gist: The mass murder-suicide in Jonestown was set off by a visit by Congressman Leo Ryan to the remote village Jones created in Guyana; the congressman went to Jonestown at the behest of concerned family members who thought that Jones was keeping people there against their will. Ryan and four others, including three journalists, were shot to death in an ambush as he and Jonestown escapees were boarding planes to leave. Soon after that ambush, Jones persuaded his followers to “drink the Kool-Aid,” a mixture of grape Flavor-Aid punch and cyanide.

The key to this recounting of that day is interviews with survivors of the ambush, including Ryan’s aide Jackie Speier, NBC soundman Steve Sung, newspaper journalists Charles Krause and Tim Reiterman and Peoples Temple defector Thom Bogue. Also interviewed are others who were either in the concerned family contingent, like former Peoples Temple member Grace Stoens, and people who escaped but were under press scrutiny afterwards, like Leslie Wagner-Wilson.

Two of the most important interviews were with Jim Jones’ son Stephan, who had a very contentious relationship with his father and was stationed at a Peoples Temple outpost in the Guyanese city of Georgetown at the time of the massacre, and Tim Carter, one of the very few Peoples Temple members who witnessed the mass murder-suicide and survived; his wife and son died during the massacre.

While there is some background on the Peoples Temple, and how Jones was able to bring together people from different races, professions and socioeconomic strata, November 18 is the focus. Another key to the series is extensive footage, shot by NBC News cameras and others, in the hours before and after the massacre — some of which has been seen before, but some has not — and extensive audio recordings Jones made as he persuaded his followers to execute the “White Knight” plan that they rehearsed in case their “utopia” was compromised.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There have been a number of documentaries and docuseries about Jonestown, and there was an episode about Jones on the Netflix series How To Become A Cult Leader. This is also part of the One Day series that examined 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination. Powers Boothe played Jones in the 1982 movie Guyana Tragedy, and director Ti West made a big impact in 2014 with The Sacrament, a fictionalized movie based on the events of Jonestown.

Our Take: The events of the Jonestown massacre have always been fascinating to us, ever since we saw the news reports of it as well as the horrific Time magazine cover of a bucket of Flavor-aid surrounded by bodies, when we were a mere 7 years old. And while other documentaries about Jonestown have spoken to many of the same people Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown spoke to — especially Speier, Carter and Stephan Jones — the way that Mohamed titrates out the events of November 18, 1978 made it as chilling as it was 46 years ago.

It’s the same with the NBC News footage, like the November 17 “celebration” put on for Ryan in the main pavilion to show just how happy everyone in Jamestown was, as well as the footage of a paranoid, enraged, lip-licking Jones spewing conspiracy language to reporters. It’s all footage that’s been shown before. But in the context of laying out exactly how the day went, knowing that these people pretending to happily dance and sing, then loudly applaud when Ryan said that he found a good community there, would be dead by the next evening still gave us chills. Recordings of Jones telling his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” while people screamed in the background were equally chilling.

By concentrating on the day, the filmmakers give a bit of short shrift to how Jones was able to build the Peoples Temple to the point where he could persuade a thousand people to leave the U.S. and relocate to the jungles of Guyana. There is some pre-Jonestown narrative that spoke to how engaging, charming, persuasive and progressive Jones was.

In all of the retrospectives of Jonestown we’ve seen, the founding of the Peoples Temple often gets neglected. As with most stories about cults, people ended up joining because of the ideals that Jones espoused. It wasn’t until Jonestown was created, and the abuses there started, did the people who followed Jones realize how much of a narcissistic, drug-addled, paranoid sociopath he really was.

It’s why the perspective of his son Stephan is so important to this docuseries. There is a segment where Stephan discusses just when he realized that his father was the way he was, and we wish we got more of that, along with more discussion about why Stephan stayed with the Peoples Temple despite everything he knew about his father. Our guess is that, given he said that it was all he knew, he was too loyal to his friends and family members to leave. We do wonder if he thinks about what might have happened if he reported his dad’s actions before the Jonestown massacre played out.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The first episode ends right before the airstrip ambush, with a blood-covered Ryan — who had been held at knifepoint — sitting in the tractor that took the contingent to the waiting planes.

Sleeper Star: As we mentioned above, Stephan Jones’ perspective is critical to understanding just who his father was and how well he masked that from his followers until he arrived at Jonestown.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of the repetition at the beginning of episodes 2 and 3 was grating, especially given the fact that this docuseries is streaming-only and is only 2 hours and 15 minutes of total runtime.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While you may know the story of the Jonestown massacre, Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown brings it to life in a new way, with lots of vivid recollections by people who were there.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.